Islands of Privacy has been published and the website is now live. Please take a look at the book to see if you are interested in reading more.
About the Book
Christena Nippert-Eng embarked on her ground-breaking study to discover how people do privacy. Loaded with stories that are funny and sad, familiar and strange, she shares her intriguing findings with us here.
Islands of Privacy is a book about the ways normal, everyday people think about privacy. It's about the ways they do privacy on a daily basis – how they try to achieve it for themselves, gift it to others, and defend both their own and others' privacy, one encounter at a time.
When Dr. Nippert-Eng started this study, she asked the people she wanted to interview for one to two hours of their time. She soon found people so ready to talk about privacy, so full of richly detailed and fascinating stories about it, that one to two hours wasn't nearly enough. They kept making appointments to talk more … and more … and more.
How do these mostly middle and upper-middle class people think about privacy? How do they do it? Why is privacy so important to people in the U.S. and why do violations of our privacy make us so crazy? For answers to these questions and more, dig in.
Read about the work of secrets, what we carry in our wallets and purses, how we manage our cell phone calls and email, and what we do when the doorbell rings. This is a book that will leave you thinking about your own life in a way that you never would have imagined – and in a way you'll never be able to stop thinking about it again…
It is not just a sum total, a given amount of disclosure and concealment that we want to achieve. The goal is to achieve selectivity in both - to carefully choose exactly what is disclosed and concealed, to whom, and how.
Privacy is about nothing less than trying to live both as a member of a variety of social units, as a part of a number of larger wholes, and as an individual, a unique individuated self.
It's often the people who know us well who are the biggest threats to our privacy.
If privacy is the condition in which private things are as private as we wish them to be, secrecy is the condition in (and through) which we try to insist that our private things are as private as we wish them to be.
oct
5
2010
The Book is Finally Here!